OPTIMAL ALLOCATION OF EMERGENCY SHELTER FACILITIES IN BEIJING
WU Wen-jie1,2, ZHU Si-yuan1,2, ZHANG Wen-zhong1
1. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, CAS, Beijing 100101, China;
2. Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, China
Abstract In contemporary China, how to achieve equity and efficiency for public service facilities' spatial distribution and rearrangement is one hot issue in the context of rapid urbanization process. Meanwhile, in order to avoid earthquakes, fires, explosions and other major natural disasters, emergency shelters play increasingly important roles in urban security. Nonetheless, researches on this issue are limited by the lack of systematic data, especially spatial data as well as other related data, and by the limitation of the traditional statistical model in establishing the complex causal relationship between the locations of public service facilities and their scale. This paper aims to explore general evaluation and actual description of the spatial distribution optimization of the urban emergency shelter facilities in Beijing, based on the Voronoi model and GIS analyzing methods. The results show that, firstly, Beijing is a large metropolis with a high population density, the capacity of emergency shelters could not meet the demand of the large population, and the spatial distribution of the emergency shelter facilities which have been built shows "uneven-distribution pattern"; secondly, as the public service infrastructure network reaches the stage of "universal" and "equalization", it is estimated that the city governments need construct at least 42 new large-scale emergency shelter facilities in the downtown area, and these emergency shelter facilities will form a reasonable facilities' service-area network, covering the whole spatial area in the downtown place of Beijing; thirdly, as a public service facilities, the emergency shelter facilities play an important role in the construction of the safety city, so the further development of it will concentrate on how to make the best integration of the fairness and efficiency allocation for the public need, which will include not only the increase in the number and the expansion of the size of the emergency shelter facility, but also attach great importance to building a multi-level spatial arrangement structure, so as to achieve the greatest social benefits. The authors point out that this research can provide information for further urban construction and planning policy making.
2010, Vol. 25 
